I recently wondered out loud (on a couple of mailing lists) how much action there is with RSS and Blogging within the Academic/Research/Scientific community.
The reason for that question was that I was considering that with those folks refereed, scholarly articles are what counts which seems diametrically opposite to the casual, ad-hoc, first-person rants that are generally associated with blogging. (Ok I am just exaggerating to make a point.)
I learned that there's actually lots and lots going on with RSS and Blogging in that world. Here are some interesting from a more or less random collection of serious science and academic pubs all of which have RSS support of some kind. This is, I am sure, nowhere near comprehensive, but it was eye opening to me.,
Pretty cool, eh?
Posted by pitosalas at July 26, 2005 09:37 AM | TrackBackEdu_RSS
http://www.downes.ca/xml/edu_rss.htm
The main application of RSS in scientific research is still aggregating links to traditional articles or press releases. And even there the vast majority of RSS feeds in scientific research are either not configurable or simply not available. Things could get much more interesting if scientists started to publish directly to blogs with the same level of scientific rigor that they do in traditional publications. One of the big issues there is the role of peer review. I would like to see more discussion on this topic and have more thoughts here:
http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/2005/07/peer-review-and-supported-documents.html
The main application of RSS in scientific research is still aggregating links to traditional articles or press releases. And even there the vast majority of RSS feeds in scientific research are either not configurable or simply not available. Things could get much more interesting if scientists started to publish directly to blogs with the same level of scientific rigor that they do in traditional publications. One of the big issues there is the role of peer review. I would like to see more discussion on this topic and have more thoughts here:
http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/2005/07/peer-review-and-supported-documents.html
The main application of RSS in scientific research is still aggregating links to traditional articles or press releases. And even there the vast majority of RSS feeds in scientific research are either not configurable or simply not available. Things could get much more interesting if scientists started to publish directly to blogs with the same level of scientific rigor that they do in traditional publications. One of the big issues there is the role of peer review. I would like to see more discussion on this topic and have more thoughts here:
http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/2005/07/peer-review-and-supported-documents.html
Nice summary!
Last December my Nature colleagues and I published a paper in D-Lib Magazine summarising RSS activity among science publishers. It also describes work that we and others have done to provide RSS feeds with rich bibliographic metadata, and to create customised aggregations of feeds:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/december2004-hammond
For a fuller list of Nature RSS feeds than that provided at the link above, see:
http://www.nature.com/rss
Also, for a nifty scientific application of RSS, check out CML-RSS, a way of carrying chemical data in RSS feeds:
http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/moin/CmlRss
Nice work Pito! It's also worth noting that scientific publisher's are thinking of other ways to use RSS other than just Table of Contents alerts. See this entry of mine recently for example:
http://atgdev.elsevier.com/blogs/cleonard/?p=6
There are many other things we could do, but this is just an example.